Strategic planning is vital to the future of any club. The larger, more successful clubs in Essex have been to the forefront in this area in recent years. Drifting from one season into the next without knowing which direction we are headed is no longer manageable given a thriving Youth section.

The Campion RFC (“the Club”) Strategic Plan identifies key areas to be targeted over the next three seasons which we can have control over.

The main reasons for producing this Plan are to promote a ‘One Club’ culture, become better organised, more progressive, increase our membership base and generate a sustainable, recurring revenue stream to invest back into the Club for the benefit of our members.

We are now operating in a world which would be unrecognisable to the founders of the Club back in 1975 and face challenges which they could not even have imagined. Doing what we’ve always done will no longer work.

Greater effort is needed to even maintain our current levels of player participation in the face of competition from other sports and activities which are now available to younger players.

The Club also faces some unique challenges, we do not pay our players to pull on the Campion jersey yet other clubs are building large squads by attracting players with sizable sums of money, and our current lack of facilities does not reconcile with our growth and development ambitions for the Club.

Many challenges are beyond our control making it more important that we plan effectively for those areas which we can control and take responsibility for.

This plan is the product of consultation with all stakeholders with input invited from all Club members and many others involved in rugby and beyond [officers, players, ex-players, coaches, supporters, sponsors, other external].

This consultative process produced wide ranging and often contradictory views, which have been distilled down to focus on a number of key strategic goals:

1. Culture
2. Club development – players, coaches, youth section and membership
3. Governance and structure
4. Facilities
5. Finance and commercial
6. Communications
7. Progression from Youth and schoolboy level rugby through to adult level rugby with the Club

Many of these areas overlap and actions relating to any one area may lead to improvement in other areas.

Many thanks to all those involved in the development of the strategic plan, particularly the nine other members of the Steering Group who gave so freely of their time and expertise, and all who contributed in any way to the production of this document.

In recent years, a group of ex-players were instrumental in setting up a Youth section of the Club, giving the opportunity to participate in the game of rugby to youngsters who the Campion School could not accommodate and to those from the local area. The Youth section goes from strength to strength and hopefully a number of these youngsters will be playing in the Adult set up in the next few years.

After a few difficult years, the Adult section is on an upward trajectory, with some excellent young talent joining the set-up and a second team is now being fielded on a regular basis.

A huge amount can be achieved by the Club when everyone works together, in a voluntary capacity, towards a common goal. I hope that the Strategic Plan will guide us successfully over the next three years of Campion Rugby.

Chairman

Niall Tiernan

Full details of the Campion RFC Strategic Plan can be found on the Strategy document below.